This study is intended to inform how the media nowadays reflects the use of ‘idioms’ and ‘proverbs’. Our work will analyse, on one hand, a small - but relevant- repertoire of series and television programmes belonging to the Spanish culture, which are frequently used within these units; and on the other hand, we will point out some didactic ELE manuals where we can appreciate the concrete use of ‘proverbs’. With this study we want to demonstrate that these units are not completely forgotten and have not gone into oblivion, but are an indisputable linguistic component in the daily life of a speaker’s language and they are a necessary topic in the teaching or learning of languages.